[News] The Global Significance Of The Amazon Protest
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Fri Jun 12 13:03:55 EDT 2009
The Global Significance Of The Amazon Protest
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21681
June 12, 2009 By Sam Urquhart
Peru's Amazon region has been locked down, after
the death of perhaps 40 indigenous protesters and
20 police during an attempt to break up a
blockade last Friday.
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/groundreport/up-to-250-indigenous-peru_b_214517.html>Some
reports have put the death toll as high as 250,
with
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8093729.stm>more
than 100 unaccounted for in the worst violence
that the Amazon region has seen since the height
of the Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s.
But while deaths are mounting, and the Amazon is
being militarized, resistance is growing across
Peru to a series of laws designed to open up the
jungle to energy investment and to break up indigenous land-holdings.
On 6 June, a peaceful blockade was allegedly
fired upon by helicopters from the nation's army.
Most of the dead were indigenous protesters, part
of a contingent at the blockade in Bagua province
which numbered thousands - all of them seeking to
resist the expansion of energy exploration and
logging into Peru's Amazon region. And many of
them appear to have been not just peaceful, but asleep.
As the NGO Amazon Watch
<http://www.amazonwatch.org/newsroom/view_news.php?id=1829>reported,
"At approximately 5 am...the Peruvian military
police staged a violent raid" during which
"several thousand Awajun and Wambis indigenous
peoples were forcibly dispersed by tear gas and
real bullets." In a brutal attack, helicopters
dropped tear gas bombs from on high while police
moved in on the protesters - shooting some in the
process. The NGO also reports that "as the
unarmed demonstrators were killed and injured
some wrestled the Police and took away their guns
and fought back in self-defense resulting in
deaths of several Police officers."
Doctors in Bagua allege that the evacuation of
casualties was obstructed. As Dr Jose Sequen
Reyes
<http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/06/06/internacional/1244268533.html>told
El Mundo, "During great part in the morning...the
police did not allow the passage of the
ambulances for the evacuation." El Mundo's
correspondent Beatrice Jimenez also reported that
"the bodies of the dead [were] being
"disappeared" by those paid by the police Special
Operations Directorate" - allegations that are
backed up by Peru's National Coordinator of Human
Rights, who has blogged about reports that his
organization has received of corpse-burning by the authorities.
This has been reported by Amazon Watch, which
reported on 8 June that "numerous eyewitnesses
are reporting that the Special Forces of the
Peruvian Police have been disposing of the bodies
of indigenous protesters who were killed" in what
Amazon Watch spokesperson Gregor McClennan
<http://www.amazonwatch.org/newsroom/view_news.php?id=1843>calls
"an apparent attempt by the Government to
underreport the number of indigenous people killed by police."
Over one hundred protesters remain in detention
while, according to McClennan, "Eye-witness
reports also confirm that police forcibly removed
some of the wounded indigenous protesters from
hospitals, taking them to unknown destinations."
Fears grow that other blockades, such as one
ongoing outside the town of Yurimaguas, could be
due to face similar repression, as an atmosphere
of fear and intimidation spreads across Amazonian Peru.
As a
<http://www.peru.com/noticias/portada20090605/37858/La-CAOI-pide-juicio-internacional-contra-Alan-Garcia-y-su-gobierno>statement
released by the indigenous umbrella group CAOI on
5 June put it, "The government of Alan Garci'a
Perez has unleashed a bloody repression in the
Peruvian Amazonia at dawn today." For CAOI, the
deaths at Bagua are "[a] dictatorial answer [to]
56 days of indigenous peaceful struggle and
supposed dialogue and negotiations, that always
finishes in bullets [and] a continuation of more
than 500 years of oppression."
Indigenous leader Walter Kategari expressed
similar sentiments,
<http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/internacional/61995.html>telling
the Mexican newspaper El Universal that "They
began to shoot against our people. And the
government knows that the natives are pacific,
but when there is an action against us they will
always find a reaction. And they made us react."
Kategari echoes the
<http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/06/06/internacional/1244268533.html>words
of Alberto Pizango, one of the major organizers
of the indigenous movement in Peru, who has said
that police shot down indigenous "brothers" like nothing more than animals.
The government, meanwhile, has responded
<http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j9pNpad9T95Yc7VQREA4BViTQRhwD98KMT982>by
verbally attacking the protesters. President Alan
Garcia said of protest leader Alberto Pizango
that he was guilty of "falling to a criminal
level: assaulting a police post, grabbing arms
from police, killing police who are fulfilling
their duty." (The government maintains that 24
policemen died in the clashes, and just 9
protesters - numbers that are
<http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47142>challenged
by eyewitness accounts.)
According to Peru's La Republica newspaper,
"Garcia reproached that some native ones have
been deceived with inexact information on the
norms that have caused to the controversy between
the State and the natives" saying that "I hope
that this finishes there. And also of the side of
the native ones that has been taken in by such
deceit to pronounce itself, without having read
the decrees" adding that "We hope that there are not more victims."
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Mercedes Cabanillas
has <http://www.livinginperu.com/news/9268>said
that the protests are merely politically
motivated - the product of Garcia's opponents -
and hence ripe for repression. Garcia himself has
said the same. As La Republica puts it, the
president has "inferred that behind the protests
international interests of competition exist to
prevent the development of the extractive industry in the forest."
On a different tack, Peru's Labor Minister has
<http://www.peru.com/noticias/portada20090605/37815/Villasante-responsabiliza-a-Alberto-Pizango-por-muertes-en-Bagua->attacked
the leaders of the indigenous movement,
counseling Peruvians to remember the fallen
police as well as the indigenous victims, and
arguing that "Pizango with his intolerance to
taken to this situation to the country."
Yet for his part, Pizango
<http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-BusinessofGreen/idUSTRE55463G20090605>told
the press that he "[held] the government of
President Alan Garcia responsible for ordering
this genocide" - and for his trouble has been
smeared on national radio, with station CNR
saying that he "might ask for asylum from
Bolivia, Venezuela or Ecuador in the next few
hours." In the event, Pizango sought sanctuary in
the embassy of Nicaragua, following threats against his life.
The war of words, gas bombs, helicopters and
bullets puts us on the brink of a precipice.
Facing a grave threat to his investment centered
economic program in the form of an indigenous
movement of unprecedented vitality and
organization, Garcia is responding with violence.
But how have we come to this pass?
Opening up the Amazon
The pace of indigenous mobilization and
resistance in Peru has quickened over the past
three years since Alan Garcia took power for the
second time as president of Peru. Garcia embarked
upon a twin-track economic strategy which has
alienated large sections of Peruvian society, but
none more so than the country's 14 million indigenous people.
On the one hand, Garcia has pushed through a Free
Trade Agreement with the United States, passing
numerous "decrees" in order to remodel the
economy to suit the terms of the deal. On the
other, he has aggressively pursued the opening up
of the Amazon to energy exploration and
development, a strategy which poses an immediate
threat to indigenous ways of life and native ecologies.
As one study published in 2008 reported, Garcia
has allotted over 70 percent of the Peruvian
Amazon to oil firms such as Argentina's
Pluspetrol, France's and France's Perenco. Such
deals have also been secured without consultation
with indigenous communities that they will
affect. In fact, Alan Garcia has overridden
concerns about indigenous rights, saying that "We
have to understand when there are resources like
oil, gas and timber, they don't belong only to
the people who had the fortune to be born there."
The decrees which Garcia passed in order to ready
Peru for integration with the U.S. economy stand
to make the expropriation of indigenous lands much easier.
Decree 1064, for instance, sought to outflank
local communities, allowing companies with
concessions to arrange changes to zoning permits
in the Amazon with Peru's central government,
potentially bypassing any form of local
consultation. Amazon Watch
<http://www.bicusa.org/admin/Document.101184.aspx>notes
that this puts Peru in contravention of ILO
regulation 169, which requires governments "to
consult with indigenous people prior to signing
contracts and establishing any development
projects that will affect them" - something which
"has never happened, but there has always been a
requirement for companies to at least negotiate a
financial settlement with a community prior to moving in."
Article 7 of Decree 1064 also
<http://www.en-camino.org/node/96>sought to
"[reclassify] communal land rights as subordinate
to individual and private ownership" while
"sub-clauses of article 7 give favor in any
conflict to individuals and companies, and to
settlers who have invaded indigenous territory."
This was supposed to work in conjunction with
decree 1089, which expanded the role of Peru's
urban land titling service, COFPRI, whose policy
"has been to promote individual land titles,
offering credit to individuals who rescind their
communal land for individual titles." Decrees
1015 and 1073, in addition, would make it easier
to break up indigenous landholdings by requiring
a simple majority amongst communities, rather
than two thirds as was previously the case.
Perhaps most controversially of all, Decree 1090
sought to drastically reduce the amount of the
Amazon covered by Peru's Forestry Heritage
protection system, "freeing" some 45 million
hectares for the purposes of economic development
(comprising some 60 percent of Peru's jungles).
This single mindedness has brought resistance.
Indigenous peoples have long struggled against
energy firms. The Achuar, for example, have taken
the American giant Occidental Petroleum to court
in Los Angeles over the pollution of their land.
Yet this resistance has never been unified.
As Latin American expert John Crabtree of Oxford
University told me "Peru, unlike Bolivia and
Ecuador, lacks a powerful indigenous movement
that brings together pro-indigenous groups in the
highlands and in the Amazon jungle." Groups in
the Amazon have often been divided and have
"always tended to focus on their own reality
rather than enter into alliances with others" but
this may be changing due to Garcia's "Law of the Jungle" (decree 1090).
The past two years have seen a deepening of
cooperation between disparate peoples in Peru's
Amazon. In August 2008, with indigenous grouping
AIDESEP in the lead, protesters blockaded some of
Peru's most important waterways and transport
arteries. A bridge in Bagua was occupied,
severing Amazonian Peru from the coast, sparking
clashes in which over 800 protesters battled with
police with tens of injuries. In the south of the
country, protesters surrounded and blockaded the
Camisea natural gas facility, as well as other
drilling platforms and a hydroelectric dam
project taking the fight against Garcia's reforms nationwide.
Spokespeople demanded the recision of over 30 of
the decrees, and for substantive consultation on
specific projects. As AIDESEP spokesman Alberto
Pizango
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7569851.stm>put
it, the protesters were "[mobilizing] themselves
for the right to life, the right to keep their
territory and to defend the environment - the
Amazon rainforest which is the lungs of the world."
At one point, the government sought to bring
AIDESEP leaders into a "dialogue" on development
issues, but protests continued when the
government made their cessation a precondition
for talks. Voices in the media began to make
absurd comparisons between the indigenous
protesters and the Sendero Luminoso (Shining
Path) - a brutal Maoist group active in the 1980s and early 90s.
The situation escalated, with indigenous
activists unwilling to step down. The government
had failed to either co-opt their
representatives, or to launch an effective
response against protests which had been almost
completely non-violent and carried support across
Peru. So when Garcia declared a state of
emergency on 19 August, instead of being able to
mop up the protests through police actions, the activists became emboldened.
One AIDESEP leader, Alberto Pizango, called the
declaration "a declaration of open war." But
indigenous Peruvians would not surrender. Far
from it, in fact. As journalist Sandra Cuffe
<http://www.dominionpaper.ca/weblogs/sandra/2001>related,
"The occupations, blockades and protests
continued; in fact, others joined in solidarity.
A provincial Committee of Struggle in La
Convención (Cusco) including a Farmworkers'
Federation announced indefinite actions in
support of the communities in the Amazon,
including blockades of roads and inter-provincial transportation."
On 20 August, AIDESEP met with the president of
Peru's Congress, Javier Velásquez Quesquén, who
agreed to convene an extraordinary plenary
session which would discuss the contentious
decrees. By the 22 August, Congress had passed
legislative decree 2440, which revoked Garcia's
decrees 1073 and 1015. Pressure from indigenous
movements had shot down two of the most
controversial decrees - those which dealt with
changes to landholding - but many still remained.
Nevertheless, as Alberto Pizango put it, "The
people of Peru, indigenous or not, have
demonstrated once more that it is possible to
reclaim our rights to life, to dignity, and to a
lasting sustainable development. This is a new
dawn for the Indigenous Peoples of the country."
Trading away the jungle
New dawn or not, many of the decrees remained in
force and continued to pose a grave threat to
indigenous communities. Moreover, in January
2009, the Free Trade Agreement between Washington
and Lima came into force after receiving the
signature of George W. Bush, and it was clear
that the FTA would further increase pressure on the Amazon region.
In the opinion of Council on Hemispheric Affairs
analyst Will Petrik,
<http://www.coha.org/2009/01/ramming-the-matter-home-peru-us-fta-rushed-diluted-and-finagled/%5d>the
consequences will be far reaching. "As small and
middle-scale Peruvian farmers are forced to
compete with U.S. subsidized agricultural
imports," he wrote in January, "it is estimated
that countless farmers will be forced off their
land, exacerbating problems, such as urban
poverty, the drug trade, and forced migration."
The integration of Peru's economy into the wider
free trade area will have profound implications
for the Amazon. In fact, as Farid Matuk, former
Director of the Peruvian National Institute of
Statistics and Informatics, told me, while "The
whole idea of the FTA is to expand the
agricultural frontier of the US economy" it will
have the effect of driving food production from
the coast into Peru's Amazon region. While
"Coastal areas will switch to growing food for
export but food production" he told me, "less
land available for food for domestic consumption
may lead to demand for land in the jungles [and]
you will need to cut more forests down to produce
more food for domestic consumption."
As Petrik added, "As the new FTA ensures investor
protections for multi-national corporations, more
of these corporations and their industrial model,
which marginalizes labor rights and the
environment as mere externalities, are likely to
negate any obstacles to expanding trade at any cost."
So the FTA carries with it an implicit pincer
movement focused on Amazonian lands. On the one
hand, there is an increasing pressure on Peruvian
land to grow food for domestic consumpion. On the
other there is the opening up of the region to
corporate investment and the hollowing out of regulatory safeguards.
The road to Bagua
On 8 April 2009, AIDESEP emerged once again with
a call-out to indigenous communities across Peru,
mobilizing 1,350 of them to launch another
campaign against Garcia's decrees and the FTA.
Blockading the Napo and Corrientes rivers,
AIDESEP demanded the repeal of remaining decrees,
taking 30,000 or more people out onto the streets
and onto the barricades, while leaving over 40
vessels owned by energy firms becalmed and unable to get to market.
By 28 April, as Intercontinental Cry
<http://intercontinentalcry.org/peruvian-indigenous-peoples-mobilize-across-the-amazon/>reported,
"protests and other blockades [had] also taken
place along the Cenepa and Santiago Rivers, on a
set of train tracks leading to Machu Picchu, and
in several other commercially-important areas in
the departments of Amazonas, Loreto, Ucayali, Madre de Dios, Cuzco and Junin."
Tensions remained relatively low, despite
continuous blockades and protests, yet by 8 May,
the government had declared a state of emergency
- with protesters beginning to challenge massive
investments. Deals like French firm Perenco's $2
billion investment in oil exploration were being
challenged by thousands of protesters demanding
"development from our perspective," as Alberto Pizango put it.
After talks with the government broke down one
week later, Pizango emerged, telling reporters
that indigenous protesters "refuse to recognize
the authority" of the government. Instead, they
will obey their ancestral laws and view any
government security forces on their lands as an
"external aggression" while "The government
"wants to take our lands and hand them over to
giant multinationals for the oil, lumber, gold
and other riches there that are coveted by the world's rich."
Yet Pizango also uttered the "I" word in
responding to government intransigence, calling
the indigenous campaign an "insurgency" - a label
that the government seized upon. President Garcia
made a rare television address, calling the
indigenous communities selfish for locking away
resources beneath their lands which should by
rights be enjoyed by all Peruvians. "We have to
understand" he said, that "when there are
resources like oil, gas and timber, they don't
belong only to the people who had the fortune to
be born there because that would mean more than
half of Peru's territory belongs to a few thousand people."
Garcia coupled this appeal to nationalism with an
escalation of force, sending Peru's military into
the Amazon region for 30 days to quell protests
at strategic locations while Pizango and AIDESEP
continued to call for dialogue. As Irene Claux of
Upside Down World reported, "Pizango stresse[d]
that "the government should lift the state of
emergency that has been established since May 9
in five Amazonian regions, the Congress must
repeal the controversial decrees, and there
should be a sit-down discussion concerning a
different path to development in the Amazon."
<http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-BusinessofGreen/idUSTRE55463G20090605>Meanwhile,
"Garcia's party declined to back a motion that
would open debate on the presidential decrees, a
move that his main political opponent, the
center-left nationalist Ollanta Humala has called
a "gross error." Garcia had, in other words,
chosen confrontation as his strategy.
Despite his unwillingness to engage in honest
talks with AIDESEP or to debate the matter in
Congress, Garcia has since then became more
desperate to end the indigenous blockades, which
are taking a direct toll on energy production and
transportation. Although protesters have failed
to hold the pipeline leading from the Camisea
natural gas project in Peru's south after almost
two weeks of occupation, other pipelines still
remain blocked. Yet even before that occupation,
as the Financial Times reports, "The
demonstrations...[had]prompted warnings of fuel
rationing within a fortnight" while in Block 1A,
run by Argentine firm Pluspetrol, operations have been suspended.
Garcia has also been
<http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/33491/peruvians_not_impressed_with_president_garca/>plummeting
in opinion polls in recent weeks, providing a
further spur to action. One poll carried out by
Ipsos, Apoyo and Opinión y Mercado put his
approval rating at just 30 percent - hardly a
mandate to force through decrees that would remould a nation.
It was against this backdrop - dismal poll
numbers and threatened investments - that Garcia
launched the assault on sleeping protesters in Bagua.
Defenders of the earth
In choosing to militarize the conflict with
indigenous protesters, Garcia is not just
attacking the physical bodies of indigenous
Peruvians. His government has set out to
challenge, and potentially dismantle, a
constellation of diverse - yet related -
cultures, all of which see "development" and the
"environment" in ways strikingly alien to
corporate strategists and neoliberal politicians.
As Ricardo Carrere, international coordinator of
the World Rainforest Movement puts it, "if you
want to do something about climate change, then
you must stop oil extraction and the reality
shows that the only people in the world who are
actually doing something to protect the world
versus climate change are the indigenous peoples saying "no more oil."
In Carrere's opinion, indigenous peoples are
standing up against forces that are antithetical
to environmental sustainability and social
justice. They are opposing an "economic logic
which means we need to destroy" and offering a
different model of development, one which "needs
to be decentralised, bringing people from the
cities back to the land where they can have a
better way of life" and demands "a very profound
change is needed in every single country."
If, as Carrere points out, "we are becoming
poorer with every barrel of oil we export" then
we are becoming richer with every indigenous
person who stands up for their lands and their
rights against energy firms. They are not simply
local instances of resistance, but are actions with global importance.
They are also the continuation of centuries of
anti-colonial resistance. As Survival
International's Stephen Corry
<http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=336792&CategoryId=14095>says,
"protests signal that the colonial era has
finally drawn to a close. No longer are Amazon
Indians prepared to put up with the illegal and
brutal treatment which has been routine. That's finished."
The protests in Peru therefore have a global
significance - both in terms of resistance
against neo-colonial investment laws and in terms
of environmental sustainability. The massacre at
Bagua speaks to all of us. As Yanomami Indian
spokesman Davi Kopenawa Yanomami eloquently
<http://www.survival-international.org/news/4644>expresses:
"We must listen to the cry of the earth which is
asking for help. The earth has no price. It can't
be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very
important that white people, black people and
indigenous peoples fight together to save the
life of the forest and the earth. If we don't
fight together what will our future be? Your
children need land and nature alive and standing.
We Indians want respect for our rights. You can
learn with us and with our shamans. That is
important not only for the Yanomami but for the future of the whole world."
And standing up is the only effective remedy.
Amidst the bloodshed in Bagua,
<http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/06/2009610205118527225.html>Peru's
Congress moved this week to suspend two of
Garcia's decrees - those that stand to open up
Peru's Amazon region to energy and mining firms.
The suspension is temporary, (arcia has fifteen
days to sign them before they are sent back to
Congress, which may or may not decide to face him
down) but resistance is growing.
Today, 20,000 or more students, trade unionists
and human rights campaigners
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8096719.stm>joined
indigenous protesters on the streets of Lima
chanting "the jungle's not for sale" and
demanding an inquiry into the events in Bagua. An
unprecedented movement is linking the peoples of
Peru's jungle with the jungles of its cities, yet
it remains to be seen whether Alan Garcia will back down.
Freedom Archives
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